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Space Shuttle Returns in a Night Landing

Gliding through a moonlit sky, the space shuttle Atlantis returned today from the newly furnished International Space Station, which will soon to be home to a permanent crew.

Within moments of the Atlantis' touchdown, the clocks in Mission Control began counting backward toward the next launching. In one of NASA's faster turnarounds, the shuttle Discovery is scheduled to take off on Oct. 5 with new space station parts.

The space agency prefers a minimum of 21 days between shuttle launchings. If the Discovery is launched on time, the gap will be 27 days.

''They did an amazing job this mission,'' the flight director, Jeff Bantle, said of the seven-man international crew. ''This moved us, I would say, a significant step closer to getting a crew on board this vehicle.''

The first full-time residents -- Capt. William M. Shepherd of the Navy and two Russians -- are scheduled to be launched aboard a Russian rocket from Kazakhstan on Oct. 30 after a delay of more than two years.

They were in Russia, training for their four-month mission, when the Atlantis touched down after 12 days in space.

Powerful xenon lights illuminated the three-mile-long runway as the Atlantis emerged from the predawn gloom like a ghost ship, with a half-moon as a backdrop. It was only the 15th nighttime landing in shuttle history.

The shuttle's commander, Col. Terrence Wilcutt of the Marine Corps, and his crew spent eight days at the space station, five of them inside. By the time they left on Sunday night, they had carted three tons of equipment into the three-room outpost.

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The crew also hooked up the toilet, oxygen generator and treadmill in the new living quarters, launched by Russia in July after multiple delays, and ran power and television cables up the outside. They left supplies like food, water, toiletries, notebooks and trash bags.

Unlike this mission, most of the work on the Discovery's planned flight -- shuttle flight No. 100 -- will be outside.

Four spacewalks are planned to wire up the first piece of station truss, or girder, and a new shuttle docking port. The crew will also install tool boxes and power converters.

NASA plans to remove the emergency oxygen packs from the spacewalking suits that flew on the Atlantis and to reuse them on the Discovery's mission.

The regulators in all of NASA's emergency oxygen packs were found in June to be contaminated with potentially flammable oil.

NASA does not have enough time to clean more packs before the Discovery takes off and will therefore reuse at least two of the ones that flew on the Atlantis, said Phil West, a NASA engineer.